Battle of the Bay Area Mayors: the 49ers scrimmage

It’s been the Battle of the Bay Area Mayors this week now that Santa Clara’s City Council has approved the $967 million proposal to put the 49ers’ stadium there — even after San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom said he can’t understand a city putting up millions for a team that “won’t even change their name.”

With the matter up to the voters now, Mission City officials are not exactly quaking at Newsom’s suggestion this week that a lawsuit might be in the cards over matters such as the use of name “49ers” and “San Francisco.”

Newsom, at an editorial board meeting with The Chronicle this week, floated just such an idea.

“We can sue because San Francisco is not Santa Clara,” and city officials can argue the team should not be called the San Francisco 49ers when it should be “the Santa Clara 49ers,” he said.

“We can deal with anti-trust issues and deal with federal stuff,” he said.

We asked Santa Clara Mayor Patricia Mahan, who came to The Chronicle’s ed board on Friday with 49ers’ officials, for her reaction to Newsom’s legal saber-rattling.

Not only did she say she doesn’t expect that to happen — she insisted she wouldn’t want the team to change its name.

“The name can’t change,” said Mahan, adding there shouldn’t even be a dicussion on that point. “The ID is with the team. The ID is with the area,” the whole Bay Area.

Besides, she added: “We’re not in it for the name. We’re in it for the money.”

And on that front, she said, the team’s proposal to build in a redevelopment area zoned for sports means that “the project will actually bring in another $20-28 million to our school districts which they wouldn’t have otherwise.”

Meanwhile, the 49ers’ Lisa Lang and CFO Larry MacNeil simply smiled at the idea of any legal action by Newsom over the use of the term “San Francisco” and “49ers.”

“I’d start in the phone book with everything that says “San Francisco,” said MacNeil.

And “the 49ers is a term from the Gold Rush — which began in Grass Valley?” Lang laughed.

The San Francisco mayor, at The Chronicle, appeared clearly frustrated with the 49ers’ South Bay plans: “They clearly want to move,” he said, which has the potential to cause huge political and economic problems in his back yard. And just as he’s seriously in pursuit of the Democratic gubernatorial nomination in 2010.